Naval Academy Probes Plagiarism Charge

Published 8:00 pm, Sunday, June 1, 2003

The Naval Academy says it will investigate allegations that a professor plagiarized portions of his new book on the history of the atomic bomb.

Authors who reviewed Brian VanDeMark's book, "Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb," said they found phrases nearly identical to those in other books. They compiled a list of more than 50 passages they say should have been clearly attributed.

"I stand by the book in total," VanDeMark said in a statement. "But I accept responsibility for rectifying my mistakes."

Reached at his home in Annapolis, VanDeMark told The New York Times, which first reported the story Saturday, that most of the disputed passages were "reasonable paraphrases," but promised to reword or add footnotes to others in future editions.

Academy officials said Saturday that VanDeMark would remain at the school in good standing during a preliminary inquiry by faculty members.

VanDeMark's colleagues in the history department described him as a careful, principled scholar who won book contracts and invitations to lecture at Oxford. He was co-author of the best-selling "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

VanDeMark's book follows the lives of the nine scientists who invented the bomb and examines the ethical quandaries they grappled with afterward.

Problems with the book were spotted by Gregg Herken, an atomic historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, who was asked to review it for the Los Angeles Times.

In his 1981 book "The Winning Weapon," Herken wrote: "Total destruction stretched out in a half-mile radius from the point of the explosion, leaving the rubble of one building indistinguishable from that of the next."

VanDeMark wrote: "Total devastation stretched out half a mile from the point of the explosion, leaving the rubble of one building indistinguishable from that of the next."

"It was almost disbelief _ an out-of-body experience," Herken said. "You can't believe that somebody would do this, especially someone from the Naval Academy."

Other phrases resemble those in "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb," by William Lanouette.

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VanDeMark lists these books in his bibliography, but neither footnotes nor places quotation marks around the passages.